u/CompetitionTrue7021

Yes, I said it, I don't think Neferata is all that impressive when you really think about it. What does she even do?

Like, seriously, she is Nagash's spymaster, rumoured to have spies in Azyr itself, to the point where it is said she knew about the Stormcast Eternals before the Gates of Azyr even opened. That sounds impressive and cool, until you remember that so did Malerion and the Skaven, which technically puts her on the same level as Thanquol. Do I need to say more?

But hey, let's ignore all that. Knowing that the Stormcast would be unleashed upon the Mortal Realms is genuinely useful information for anyone. But for Neferata, someone we're constantly told is incredibly smart, think about what she could have done with it:

Build a spy network to track Stormcast movements before they arrived.

Control mortal rulers so Sigmar found fewer willing allies.

Lure enemies into Stormcast attacks, letting Sigmar's forces destroy rival armies instead of her own.

So what does she actually do with this information? Absolutely nothing.

She just sits on her throne, chuckling to herself about intelligence she would never use, intelligence gained at the modest price of one of her fit pic.

But surely she's at least making use of those connections beyond receiving Azyr's daily morning news, right?

Sort of. She uses her connections to send personal hit squads of Witch Hunters to eliminate vampires who have personally offended her, all without drawing attention to herself. And why? Because at some party, a fellow vampire didn't compliment Neferata quite enough, so now she waste Order of Azyr resources bought with taxes paid by Sigmarites just to have a Witch Hunter dispatched this "horrible injustice" done to her. Really something to behold.

But, I hear you say, what about her personal accomplishments? The kingdoms she's conquered and the armies she's defeated?

Yeah, about that, who actually cares? I mean really, who here genuinely cares about the Shyish city of Lugo, which Neferata conquered by transforming its king into her vampire thrall? I'm fairly certain until right now, nobody here had ever even heard of that city, let alone knew where it was, beyond it being somewhere in Shyish. And you don't need to know, because it will never be brought up again, consigned to a Schrödinger's cat-style purgatory.

As for the enemies she's defeated,show me the model for the Khorne Daemon Prince Graunos. Oh wait, there isn't one. Which means that Neferata has, so far, only fought enemies with no notable presence in the wider narrative, characters used purely as fodder to demonstrate how brilliant she supposedly is, with every plan going perfectly according to plan, with no complications that might force her to adapt on the fly.

So what does she actually spend most of her time on, to the point she is almost entirely absent from the wider events of the Mortal Realms? Oh, you know, invading Mannfred's territory of Carstinia like it's an episode of Pinky and the Brain.

0 feats.

0 relevance.

7,000 failed Carstinia invasion attempts.

Do you think Ravenor is the professor?

Hello, fellow Aether Scholars. If you've ever perused any Age of Sigmar book featuring a wizard as a character, you've no doubt noticed how dull spellcasting can often be portrayed. In some books, such as Soul Wars, characters who are supposedly powerful sorcerers barely cast spells at all, instead relying almost entirely on their weapons. That's a real shame in a setting like the Mortal Realms, where everything is suffused with magic, yet we rarely get to see truly imaginative or spectacular displays of spellcasting.

That's why it was such a breath of fresh air to see how this book portrays the act of casting a spell, something I hope becomes more common throughout Age of Sigmar.

This excerpt is taken from chapter 3 pg.49-52

Context: At this point in the story, Van Horstmann is a newly inducted acolyte of the Collegiate Arcane's Order of Light. Alongside several other acolytes, he has been summoned to assist the Grand Magister in an exorcism ritual. The ritual goes disastrously wrong when the daemon escapes from the victim's body and begins attacking those present.

>There was an ocean beyond human sight. The aethyr. It was one thing to speak of it, but to understand it was another. Quite possibly no man, no high elf even, had ever fully understood what it was. It was not a physical place, yet it could only be spoken of as if it were so because no tongue of man could describe the concepts of the aethyr truly. It was spoken of in metaphor. It was an ocean, with each drop enough to power the working of a mage’s wonders. It was a city teeming with inhabitants, but they were not people or creatures – they were ideas, concepts, emotions, given a real form in the aethyr.

>

>It was a mirror that reflected every mind in the Old World, so that every thought, every fleeting sensation, left its mark on the aethyr like tracks in the snow. It was a single living being so immense and complex that its consciousness encompassed everything a man knew or ever could know. It was nothing at all and existed only as potential to be tapped, a void to be filled by the act of observing it. It was a puzzle box. It was a map to everywhere. It was a book in which was written every possibility that might ever come to pass. It was a mighty mountain range, down from whose peaks the winds of magic blew. It was the opposite of the physical world, a twin composed of energy and thought. It was every dream ever dreamed. It was an infinite and perfect heaven. It was a hell inimical to sane existence.

>

>No man’s concept of the aethyr could be perfect, and so every wizard had his own. It was dangerous to develop such an idea too early, for if the understanding was flawed the interaction with the aethyr might similarly be flawed, and the raw magic could harm or corrupt, or the wizard could find himself prey to the predators that lived there – if the aethyr was an ocean, it had sharks. The training of a wizard therefore involved the laborious study of countless versions of the aethyr, each one laboured at for a mighty wizard’s lifetime, each one inevitably flawed. Gradually he was to develop his own, so that by the time he wore the robes of a magister the vision of the aethyr was fully formed in his mind and through that vision he could draw on the winds of magic. To van Horstmann, the aethyr was a great plain, such as he envisioned might be found in the distant Southlands. This was the image he conjured in his head even as he realised the daemon had seen him and would go for him next.

>

>Upon this plain stood a fortress. It was alone and inviolate. Though the plains were hot and inhospitable, the fortress always stood. It was made of iron, a dull metallic tower rooted deep into the earth. It had enormous doors of studded oak and when van Horstmann willed it – only when he willed it – they would swing open to reveal the cool, dark interior, shielded from the deadly sun. Inside were a million glowing gemstones in every colour. They had been quarried from beneath the plain, refined instances of the aethyr’s power, gusts of the winds of magic frozen and crystallised. Van Horstmann could walk into this fortress. He did this in his mind’s eye as he dragged Rudiger Vort behind a crumbling wall, forcing one half of his mind to focus on the vision as the other commanded his body to do whatever it had to in order to stay alive.

>

>.....

>

>In his mind, van Horstmann studied the gemstones arrayed before him. They hung in the air, and above them soared the circular walls of the tower. The upper floors were distant, and the great majority of the fortress was taken up with this chamber in which each sphere of frozen power was held in position like the stars in the sky. Van Horstmann selected one. This process could not be rushed, no matter how urgent. It was far worse to make the wrong selection than to make a decision too late.

>

>One of the gemstones shone with destruction, but also with hope, a little anger, some fear, and a halo of determination. A dark vein of agony ran through it and normally this would have caused van Horstmann to reject it as flawed. Not now. Now, it was just what he needed. In the real world, van Horstmann glanced down into the pit. He could just see Alric down in the darkness, lying insensible for the moment. The daemon was gathering itself for another bolt of change. Van Horstmann had seconds, at most.

>

>He drew back a hand. Black fire coalesced around it, thrumming deeply enough to shudder the stones under his feet. Lines of fire crazed up his forearm, and he clenched his fist as the pain hit. Pain was a part of magic, just as it was a part of everything else. Van Horstmann welcomed it, focused it, forced it into a point and threw it forward. The bolt of flame arced across the pit like the trail of a dark comet. It slammed into the daemon and it lost its grip, tumbling into the pit. Van Horstmann gasped. Hot and cold were flashing through him, the touch of the aethyr.

>

Note: the Aethyr from WFB and AOS seems very similar between each settings and doesn't seem that it's properties has change very much.

Hello, Starbound Archivists. I was wondering what happens if you use Aetherquartz or Chamonite to empower a celestial spell, a grey spell, or other spell types. Does the empowerment actually work, or does it have no effect on those spells?